Computer networks are increasingly prone to attacks from malicious hackers, even as the number of companies and their degree of reliance on these computer networks to store and maintain vital work product, communications, data, money accounts, and other sensitive information or items is rising. Often, attacks on computer networks can include the destruction or theft of such vital items and sensitive information, causing substantial loss to the company, its clients, and/or its employees. Instances of blackmail resulting from stolen data or secrets similarly cause substantial losses to companies and individuals. Thus, companies and people often employ various network security measures to prevent and/or mitigate the loss due to attacks or theft on their computer networks.
In some cases, the probability and magnitude of the potential loss have caused companies and individuals to take out insurance policies to mitigate any losses due to attacks on their computer networks or computer systems. Some of these insurance companies require or offer incentives to their policyholders to implement strong network security measures in order to minimize losses that the insurance companies may be obligated to cover.
Existing security products may provide scores to a potentially hostile event with a simple pass/fail mechanism, which does not provide a sufficiently rich vocabulary for describing the fluid and analog nature of security risk scoring. In order to avoid false alarms, existing scoring and ranking technologies raise the threshold score for reporting an attack.
Unfortunately, the binary nature of existing risk scoring technologies and methods can allow real attacks which are far below the score of the false-alarm (false positive) threshold to go undetected or unreported. As a result, businesses and people's networks, computer systems, and contents thereof are vulnerable to these undetected and unreported real attacks.
The background discussion is intended to provide information related to the present invention which is not necessarily prior art.